Monaloca

This past weekend Melina got to witness her first full-fledged wedding. She’s been to a few wedding parties in summers past, but Rosa and Frank invited the whole family to the full affair at Rosa’s family’s farm – complete with picture-perfect sloping vineyards and a newly-created terrace that doubled as a dance floor – in Sonoma County.

On the way up we managed to stop by one vineyard, Taft Street, which we discovered has its origins a mile down the road in a Rockridge garage, on Taft Street of course. (Double bonus: We liked the wine so much we joined the club and walked out with half a case. And the tasting room was both kid- and pet-friendly.) At the wedding itself I had a great time catching up with my BigTent friends and we all enjoyed lounging on a grass-covered hillside, eating strawberries (Nalani), and drinking wine (me), beer (Joey), and Martinelli’s apple cider out of a highball glass (Melina).

At age four, our “big” girl was full of questions and wonder. On the drive up she asked, “Will the marrying girl wear a long, beautiful white dress?” Of course. (I’d seen photos, so I was certain.) “Will she have the marrying thing on her head?” Maybe. It’s called a veil. “Will her nails be painted?” Probably. And sure enough, Rosa showed them off – fingers and toes – to Melina after the ceremony. My favorite question, in four-year-old deadpan, was “Will the marrying girl have boogers in her nose?” Well, everyone does, so yeah. Joey added that she’ll probably blow her nose before she walks down the aisle.

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Next week Melina starts pre-K in the Tiger room, Nalani starts visiting the Toddler table at daycare, and Kai starts third grade. We’ve had loads of fun this summer, and the kids – especially the littlest one – continue to grow by leaps and bounds.

Nalani

After an on-queue start to language (especially “mo ma” for “more milk”) at around a year, Nalani lost her words. By 14 months she had reverted back to little more than grunts and hand motions, probably because they got her just what she wanted. She’s always been chatty in her own way, but for the past couple months it’s been nonsense in absolute perfect American English cadence.

Happily for us, she recently rediscovered a few sounds we can all understand. Favorite words include “bird” (especially when looking at the birdie pictures in her room), “nana” for banana, “ma” for milk, and of course “mo” when she wants more. We hear things that sound like “good morning” repeated back when we say it to her, and she often says “yeah” when we ask her questions. She has started her own sign for food, pointing one finger gently at her mouth until we give her more to eat.

She’s also started using a spoon (semi successfully) and hates to be fed by anyone else, which makes things like yogurt or applesauce a messy endeavor. She still naps horribly at home (the most we get is 20 minutes in her crib), but beautifully at daycare. She also sleeps perfectly, 12-13 hours, nearly every night. She loves bedtime so much that she’ll walk right over to her sleep sack and sit on it so we can zip her in. And she goes to bed wide awake, with or without milk (but usually with a song), and nearly always without a peep.

Physically, she climbs full flights of stairs with a little too much ease (especially when I’m not watching closely at Mina’s preschool) and can open the closet door in the big kids’ room. When exiting the kitchen, she wisely throws things she wants down the small stairs to get them into the family room ahead of her. Sometimes this includes her baby stroller, which always lands with a pretty big thud. At certain playgrounds she can do the full circuit of stairs then down the slide on the tot lot, all by herself.

Melina

A few weeks ago Melina told me, “When Nalani’s a little older we’ll have three kids.” And a few days later, “I want Nalani to be three so she’ll start copying me.” Big sister really wants to play with little sister, and I bet it will happen sooner than any of us thinks. Mina may not see it but Nali is already copying her: She carries her bacchi all over the house, just like big sis. She pulls on Mina’s hair, just like big sis does to her. And she loves playing in big sister’s bedroom and preschool classroom more than just about anywhere.

But Melina has plenty of things that baby sis won’t appreciate for a while. This summer she had her first viewing of Wizard of Oz (with Grandma Rapoza) and Star Wars (with Daddy). I’m still shocked she made it through the wicked witch and monkey scenes in Wizard. As for Star Wars, she loved Princess Leia (but “only at the end when her hair was different”) and really wanted to see “Dark Vader” with his helmet off.

Melina’s drawings have become much more intricate in the past month alone. She tends to pick a theme and practice it for a week or so at a time. Recent endeavors include hearts, cupcakes, and our whole family standing under a sunny sky. All her drawings now include “all the colors of the rainbow,” including, you guessed it, pink!

To illustrate it’s not all about pretty and princesses with our fairy-infatuated four-year-old, she has started wearing pants (I haven’t bought her any in so long they’re all too short), and one day last month she asked me this:

Melina: Can I ride a rocket ship to outer space one day?
Me: Sure, if you become an astronaut.
Mina: Or an alien.

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Last week we took a road trip down to Southern California to visit family, and more importantly, experience Disneyland with the kids. Take a look at all our trip photos on Flickr.

A few weeks ago Melina asked me, “Are the princesses at Disneyland REAL?” Fantasy and reality walk a fine line for the preschool set. Melina is keenly aware that the line exists, and for the past six months or so has been asking plenty of questions to try to pinpoint where it stands.

Once at Disneyland, she aptly pointed out that Tinker Bell and Princess Jasmine were real (as were the many little girls walking around in Jasmine, Ariel, and Cinderella costumes), but Minnie, Mickey, and Goofy were not. They were people wearing costumes complete with headgear, which is also why they couldn’t speak. Logical, right?

Our first family trip to Disneyland held plenty of fun and discovery for all of us, and by all I mean six kids and six grown-ups. We road-tripped down to visit Cyndie and Rich in South Pasadena a few days early, then met up with my parents and my sis and her family for two full days of Disney fun, complete with a swimming pool at our down-the-block Anaheim hotel.

A run-down of some favorites:

– Kai absolutely loved Pirates of the Caribbean, which is a standing favorite of my own. All 12 of us rode together before the fireworks on night one, and our family rode again the next day. Melina was scared the first time and kept confirming with me that the pirates were all pretend. By round two she knew what to expect and gave it a hesitant thumbs-up.

– Melina most liked meeting Tinker Bell in Pixie Hollow and riding the new Little Mermaid ride in California Adventure.
– Joey and Kai both loved Star Tours. Melina rode, too, but wasn’t a huge fan.
– Nalani adored It’s a Small World. She’d been super cranky in the afternoon heat, but as soon as we (again all 12 of us!) got on the boat her face lit up. Through the whole ride she kept saying “oooooo…” and pointing at the musical figures.

– We all (except maybe Nali and Ella) enjoyed the fireworks show from New Orleans square on night one. Far better than our view of bayside fireworks on July 4th from the Berkeley Rose Garden!
– Despite the insane crowds and wait, my parents and I found the World of Color water/light/fire show in California Adventure spectacular.

– Somehow Stacie and I got Lucas (5) and Melina (4) to ride Space Mountain. Melina is barely 40 inches tall but by squeaking by a whole world of rides opened up to her. Since it’s pitch black on the ride I couldn’t see her reaction, but as soon as the coaster came to a halt she said, “Mommy, I don’t want to ride that again.” She didn’t mind the roller coaster per se, but didn’t like the dark. Fair enough.

The only real downer was the heat. We Berkeleyites just aren’t used to temps in the mid- to high-80s, especially spending a full day in that full sun. Next visit (which will probably be when Nalani starts asking to visit Mickey, Minnie, and Tinker Bell) will definitely not be mid-summer. Maybe by then Melina will have worked up the courage to brave Space Mountain with me again.

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I taught her to scoot down our family room steps on Monday and she’s been practicing all week. I’m a proud mama.

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Last weekend we took our first family camping trip along with two other families. Joey hadn’t been super thrilled about the idea, and less so when we realized I somehow managed to book it for his birthday weekend. (It was the one time that worked for everyone.) But he hadn’t realized that sometimes camping is really just hanging out, drinking, eating, and playing in the forest with friends. And we had plenty of all of that for a day and a half.

The three highlights for me were being surrounded by redwoods, spending quality time with good friends, and all the delicious food we managed to cook over an open fire. And by “we” I really mean our friends, who were so eager to camp cook that Joey and I ended up just bringing lunch fixings. We also drank. James home-brewed Joey (and really, the rest of us) a birthday ale just for the trip. I hear he was trying to copy Red Spot from Jupiter. It was tasty and smooth, and much to his surprise we managed to polish it off before the end of the second night.

Dinner menus went something like this. Night one: fresh baguettes and delicious cheeses from the Cheeseboard, followed by steak and seasoned shrimp skewers grilled over the open fire. Fire-warmed berry cobbler and s’mores for dessert. Night two: fire-roasted baguette slices topped with fire-warmed goat cheese and spicy olive tapanade as a starter. Marinated chicken thighs cooked over the grill alongside potato cakes, and served with arugula salad. Homemade birthday brownies for Joey – and more s’mores – for dessert. And the breakfasts were just as good.

All four girls seemed to have a blast, but outside marshmallow roasting I’m not sure how much food played a part. The older girls played in a pup “play” tent, colored on a table-top-like redwood stump, and visited a nearby creek. Nalani, well, she just explored our campsite, tried to join in the big girl fun, and got covered in dirt. Since there was only one toddler and only two real dangers (the biggest being the fire, the other being the not-so-traveled camp road at the far end of our site) it wasn’t too big of a deal to keep her safe. The four- and five-year olds also helped.

We’d had to gear up a little before the adventure began. We bought a tent meant for six (in reality it fits two adults and two small children fine, but adding Kai would have been a squeeze.) The kids helped me set it up in our backyard the weekend before, so we knew what we were doing but somehow in taking it down we managed to lose two stakes.

For Nalani at night we brought the princess sleep tent Melina used in Portugal, meaning she was snug and sound in a tent inside a tent. Our little girl went down beautifully both nights as soon as we saw she was tired. And she slept beautifully both nights until exactly 2am, when she, right next to us, started to grumble, tried to get comfortable, couldn’t, and then devolved into a screaming fit that lasted at least 45 minutes. Both nights. As one of Melina’s preschool teachers joked when she heard the story, “Nalani, you woke up all of Sherwood forest!”

Early morning screaming fits aside, even Joey agreed it was tons of fun and will be even better next year when our littlest girl is a little bit bigger. Rachel and Zac are on board for take two, so now we just need to see if we can talk Tracee, our other hesitant camper, into it!

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Grandma Rapoza arrived for a month-long visit from Hawaii last week, and we’ve kept her on her toes with all sorts of fun. We started the weekend with a trip to Roseville to visit the Hams. Grandma got to meet Ella and see the twins, who she last saw at our wedding when they were just nine weeks old. We “enjoyed” 100 degree weather by the kiddie pool (beers in hand) and some water fun with cousins, then made it back to Berkeley in time for Jupiter and ice cream with Lily and her family.

We started our Independence Day celebrating early, with a play group BBQ at Lily’s pad. Luckily our Berkeley weather was also warm enough for the kids to dip in the wading pool – even Nalani had fun playing with the big girls and eating pulled pork. Joey and I enjoyed plenty of beer (thanks, James!) and stayed long enough to make it home safely.

We spent the holiday on a picnic at Memorial Park, which has become our serendipidous annual tradition. No pony ride this year (and Melina wasn’t brave enough to try the mechanical bull), but we did enjoy a water balloon toss, plenty of music and sunshine, and a kiddie bounce house. Nalani had a great time walking up to other people’s picnics and trying to walk off with their food. She actually made it a few feet with someone’s bag of watermelon before I caught her.

Later that afternoon the kids, Grandma, and I took a bike ride to the park around the corner, and that evening Melina got to see her first fireworks from the Rose Garden. The view was a stretch (Kai was bummed we weren’t right under the show), and the kids had to perch on grown-ups’ shoulders. But we had far better luck than when I took Kai up there a few years ago and the low fog was so thick we couldn’t see a thing.

Joey and I both took several days off work to hang out with the kids and his mom, so we decided to round out our staycation with a trip to the Academy of Sciences in SF. It re-opened at least three years ago, and the first time we tried to visit last summer we made it as far as the parking garage and Melina threw up. This week’s trip was a greater success, and by heading there on a weekday we got to breeze through the line to the butterfly rainforest, and get front row seats to watch the penguin feeding. The girls and their friends had a blast, though the hot dog lunch was as big a hit as the fish behind glass.

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Or wading pool, as the case was this afternoon at a fun-loving BBQ with the Schultzes. We all had a great time, especially the posse of four-year-old girls!

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We’ve had a fun start to summer as our littlest girl takes on toddlerhood. (Or, as Melina calls it, waddlerhood. She’s in the Waddler class at daycare, after all.)

Nalani walks FAST, so fast it could count as running at times. And she is into everything! Favorite games include pulling things out of trash cans, and putting non-trash items (books, toys, cans of food) in them. She loves to run away from her parents, and will always give us a sly grin. She adores her two siblings and any other kid around her size. The other day she followed a fellow little sib across two rooms and out the back door at Melina’s preschool.

Nalani has also gotten the hang of basic routines, and in fact seems to thrive on them more than our other two kids. She’ll help us put away bath toys as we sing the clean-up song, and even closes the baby gate behind her after crawling up the three steps to the kitchen. The other day as I was talking to Jeanie next door, she decided she was ready to go home so walked along the sidewalk and turned up the driveway to head to our front door. All by herself.

Our baby adores music, and just started a music class for tots and parents. She’s the littlest one, but has a blast and knows the hand signs for “twinkle twinkle” and “head, shoulders…” Music aside, she also knows the signs for more, milk, and water. She uses “more” often when eating! She talks quite a bit (in fact her teacher at daycare says she tries to “chat” with kids in the next crib at nap time), and now has a repertoire of bona fide words. She says “mo… mo…” (more… more), “mo ma” (more milk), “aaa duh” (all done), “book” and at times “boo boo” (blue blue, for blueberries, her favorite food these days).

Our big girl is also growing and maturing almost daily. Sometimes I look at her and wonder where my baby went, and who put this kid in her place. She’s still a night owl who loves ease into sleep with batches of books, and ease into her day with lots of hugs and giggles. She almost never wears pants, and now likes “all the rainbow” in addition to pink as a favorite color. She writes her name beautifully, and knows how to spell all of her preschool friends’ names.

Melina has a wonderful sense of logic, some of it due to how a four-year-old’s mind works, but I’m sure plenty innate to her being her. In a commonplace example, the other day I got a huge scrape on my nose. (Short story is our new minivan attacked me.) Melina noticed immediately and expressed concern, and when I said “I’m not sure what to do about it, I can’t put a bandaid on my nose,” she responded, “I know! You can use neosporin!” And she was right.

Her curiosity also continues to flourish, like in this recent conversation.
Mina: When was the first day?
Me: The first day of what?
Mina: The first day of everything.

In sadder news, good friends of ours recently lost a baby just two weeks before her due date. Melina knows them and helped me make banana muffins for a care package, so I told her what had happened. Her response, “but how can a baby die before it’s born, when it’s not even zero?” sums up perfectly the question we’re all grappling with.

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Melina topped off birthday party season at our house with a bang. Because I joined a moms’ group when she was a newborn, she now has eight little friends whose birthdays are within a month of hers, and three with birthdays within days. Emma’s birthday is just two days after Melina’s, and with the girls swimming together and both being HUGE fans of princesses and pink, I asked her mom if they might want to join forces with a party. In the end we let they girls decide. They “discussed” it during swim class one day and decided that a joint party would be lots of fun.

On to the planning… we soon decided to reserve a park area, and then Queen Mama Anna went straight to work on decorations, putting my enthusiasm to shame. She sewed a “marrying” princess tent (decorative bows and ribbons on a large mosquito net tent), made “throne” coverings for two folding chairs, and started creating castle facades to hang at the park.

Melina insisted on a pinata (check), princess plates and pink party-ware (check), and of course balloons (we put Grandma and Grandpa Weiss on that task, so check!) We had the Beelers over one night for a pizza planning session, divvied up food tasks, and decided to have the “fairy godmother” (Emma’s godmother) do face painting for the kids and my parents to run a craft station.

Melina wanted a princess castle cake, so we started looking at pictures online and brainstorming the best way to make her cake dream come true. A friend of mine found a perfect pattern, right before Anna did a practice run for Emma’s cake. (I wasn’t that organized.) Turns out her practice cake was based on the same 3D, square tower idea as my friend’s pattern, and Melina loved the picture she saw. Outside of needing to buy square cake pans, we were set!

We should have been set. But we’ve had an unusually cold, wet spring this year, and as luck would have it, an unseasonable three-day storm was forecast to land the day before the party. The 20-kid, 25-adult, outdoor-in-a-park, first-weekend-in-June party, a date when rain should not be in the equation. At first we both avoided the thought of a backup plan. We saw 40% chance rain as 60% sun. But then it turned to 60% chance rain, and sudden downpours (sun one minute, sheets of rain the next) earlier in the week made second-guessing the weather a dicey proposition.

We went through a number of different ideas but in the end settled on having the party at Emma’s house, in their lovely basement room and garage that open directly to the backyard. We got lucky: It didn’t rain, and it wasn’t horribly cold. But it did threaten, so we didn’t regret our decision to forgo the park. All our little princesses (and a few princes and knights) had a wonderful time, and each got a chance to hit the pinata once before it was broken open by biggest-kid Kai.

In what Joey calls the ultimate princess move, Melina refused to wear a princess dress to her dress-up party and instead chose a new T-shirt from Grandma Rapoza and a pink tutu. She wanted to wear jammies. I told her she could save that idea for her fifth birthday party, and amazingly she agreed.

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This week has been birthday week for our biggest girl, who turned four yesterday. We started off the celebrating with a family trip to Children’s Fairyland on Memorial Day. Because of the special trip, Melina was a little confused about why she wasn’t turning four on Monday. And because we’ve been talking about visiting Disneyland this summer, she also confused the two and kept saying we were visiting “Disney” land, not “Fairy” land. She had plenty of fun at the pint-sized Fairyland, so I can’t wait to see her reaction to Disney come August!

(Fun side bit: See an almost two-year-old Melina waiting for a treat at the very same pumpkin cafe.)

To mark her true birthday, we started with a mommy-and-Melina cafe breakfast. Melina chose a chocolate croissant and decided to eat nothing but the chocolate out the middle. That evening our full family – Kai included – dined at Zachary’s pizza (Melina’s choice) followed by ice cream at Dreyer’s down the street.

The best is yet to come: On Sunday we’re co-hosting a princess party for Melina and her friend Emma. It’s supposed to be a park party, but amazingly, the early June forecast is for rain. Melina claims we can just use umbrellas, but we’re opting for a backup plan, and if need be will transform our house into a castle. If Melina’s vision comes true, this will include triangular traffic cones on each corner of our roof, made to look just like castle towers.

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